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Newer page: version 2 Last edited on Saturday, May 6, 2006 8:49:16 pm by LawrenceDoliveiro
Older page: version 1 Last edited on Saturday, May 6, 2006 8:44:50 pm by LawrenceDoliveiro Revert
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-''The Mythical Man Month Anniversary Edition'', Frederick P Brooks Jr, Addison-Wesley 1995, ISBN -201-83595-9. 
+''The Mythical Man- Month Anniversary Edition'', Frederick P Brooks Jr, Addison-Wesley 1995, ISBN -201-83595-9. 
  
 This is a classic book about the pitfalls of large software programming projects ("programming-in-the-large"). Brooks wrote the first edition in 1975, after his time as project manager for IBM's OS/360 operating system. OS/360 was, for its time (1960s), a massive effort, with planned features way beyond anything available in most other operating systems of the time. Naturally it fell behind schedule and went over budget. In an effort to remedy the problems, more programmers were brought in to help, but for some reason they only made things worse. Hence Brooks' Law (page 25): 
  
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 Then, in 1995, this Anniversary Edition of the book was released. The original text of the 1975 book was included unchanged. To this was appended the 1986 essay, followed by another chapter called ''"No Silver Bullet" Refired'', plus a careful listing of all the propositions made in the chapters of the original book, and notes on whether they still held true or not. 
  
 One important conclusion reached in the 1995 addenda was that there had been ''no'' order-of-magnitude improvement in programmer productivity over the prior decade. Whereas in the 1986 essay, Brooks had left open the possibility that ''more than one'' of the technologies mentioned, working in concert, might have been able to effect such an improvement, as it turned out ''none'' of them were able to achieve any such thing. Far from being a pessimist in his original conclusion, he had in fact been an optimist. 
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